On this day in 1919: Professor Frederick Koch’s Carolina Playmakers debut with a trio of short plays in the Chapel Hill High School auditorium. Leading the bill: “The Return of Buck Gavin, A Tragedy of the Mountain People,” written by Thomas Wolfe, who also plays the part of Buck. Among Prof Koch’s other notable early […]

“In 1943 Roosevelt asked Jonathan Daniels to serve as minister to New Zealand, [but] Senator Josiah W. Bailey blocked his appointment. A foe of Daniels in state politics, Bailey did not like Daniels’s reference to Robert E. Lee’s army as ‘largely composed of white men who were not only slaveless but almost as degraded as […]

“Aware of the term’s inappropriateness in everyday speech, [Jonathan Daniels in 1941] yet considered [“nigger”] ‘an indispensable word… in all colorful discussions of American life.’ “He believed, and hoped others would agree, that when he used the word ‘nigger’ or ‘pickaninny,’ he used them with sympathy and not malice and to describe more accurately the […]

“The more violent forms of hate-peddling [during the 1960 presidential campaign] have come in for attack by major Southern papers [such as] the Greensboro, N.C. News: ‘Organized efforts on the part of respectable Protestant churches to inject venomous, and in many cases false, prejudice into the presidential campaign are in themselves violative of the American […]

“At 79, famed Tarheel Editor Josephus Daniels last week staged a spry comeback on his lively, incomplete, partisan, aggressive, successful Raleigh News & Observer. After a nine-year absence (as Ambassador to Mexico) shrewd old ‘Uncle Joe’ Daniels had ‘enlisted for the war’ to replace his son Jonathan, who went to OCD [Office of Civil Defense] […]

“If Harry Truman ever had a faithful Boswell, he was Jonathan Daniels, the even-voiced editor of the Raleigh, N.C. News & Observer (circ. 113,277). Daniels, briefly Truman’s press secretary in 1945, was always welcomed at the White House as a friendly reporter. The President read, and edited in galley proof, large chunks of Daniels’ ‘The […]

“In an event unprecedented in the South, a Negro last month won North Carolina’s Mayflower Cup, awarded annually by the North Carolina Society of Mayflower Descendants, for the best book by a resident of the State. This year’s winner is 37-year-old J. Saunders Redding, professor of English literature and creative writing at Virginia’s Hampton Institute […]